an Irish playwright and Librettist. Bickerstaff had first arrived in London in 1755 and worked as a playwright. His years growing up in Dublin, a cultural hub at the time, had greatly influenced his views on writing and the arts. He developed a view that the English language was totally unsuited for singing operas in, however skilled the composer, and that Italian was the natural language. Later in life, he was to challenge this view. In London he initially struggled and his first work Leucothoé, a dramatic poem, was a failure. While critically well received by two reviewers it had not been set to music and performed and was widely ignored.
